Dignity for my Yemeni Students & the Inhumanity of Trump’s Anti-Muslim Immigration Ban

The majority of U.S. citizens do not support the current predator-in-chief.* He does not speak for us or represent our views. We condemn his racist and xenophobic actions, most recently the executive order he signed yesterday that temporarily bans citizens – including refugees – of Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen and Iran from entering the United States.

In the past seven years, I have had the privilege of working with a growing number of English-language learners from Yemen. Their families are not terrorists. My current students – aged five to ten – trade Pokémon cards and read Diary of a Wimpy Kid. They play soccer and make drawings of purple horses and flowers. They cry when they fall on the ice and bleed. Last year, one student broke my heart when she regularly interrupted me to tell me that her cousins in Yemen had no food and were starving. And in November, a truly perplexed fourth grader asked me, “Why does Trump think we are terrorists?”